With the continual advancement of microelectronics, the market is now supplied with a variety of electronic devices, which bring tremendous convenience to our daily lives. Generally speaking, these electronic devices are each equipped with an independent control unit for monitoring system operation.
In known electronic device systems, such a control unit can drive each peripheral unit of an electronic device into operation either directly or indirectly (e.g., through hierarchic control). If some peripheral units malfunction during a conventional system operation, the control unit will, upon detecting the abnormal condition, send a deactivation signal or a reset signal to the malfunctioning peripheral units to deactivate or reset the peripheral units, thereby preventing unnecessary disasters attributable to abnormal system operation (e.g., the breakdown of an entire network system due to a malfunctioning network device).
While the aforesaid approach can, to some degree, effectively enable automatic system repair, not all peripheral units can resume normal operation in this way. It has been found that certain peripheral units (e.g., certain chips) do not have a dedicated pin for receiving the reset signal and therefore can only be reset in response to the switching on or off of the power source (generally known as power-on reset). Should this kind of peripheral units malfunction (e.g., in the case of a chip crash), the control unit will be unable to reset the malfunctioning peripheral units in the foregoing manner, thus failing to correct the abnormality in system operation.
The issue to be addressed by the present invention, therefore, is to design an electronic device capable of automatically resetting and an automatic resetting method thereof. It is desirable that, when the electronic device is improperly activated, it will automatically cut off and then restore power supply in order to be automatically reset.